Life

I’ve always been hesitant to describe myself as a collector, but the truth is that I’ve been collecting things my whole life. From stuffed animals and sticks when I was little (yes, sticks) to books to comics to toys, there hasn’t been a time in my life that I wasn’t out chasing something to add to a “collection”. And even though in my mind I always saw myself first becoming a collector while in college, as I get older I realize that the period of time from when I put away all my toys as a young adult to the time in college when I rediscovered them again feels less like a defining moment in my life and more like a rare anomaly. And more importantly, do I want to continue to be defined as an adult with a “toy room” in his house?1That was a rhetorical question. I didn’t like being known for that once I turned 30! My office at work…that’s another story. And what does collecting mean to my life, after all?2Emphasis on MY life. This should go without saying, but this whole essay relates to me, personally, alone. I’m not throwing shade on anyone else and their collecting habits. Do what makes you happy!

To answer that, let’s back up. Waaaaay back. Back to the late 1970s, and the chain of events that would ultimately end with my collecting habits set in stone. Back then, I was a pretty normal kid like any other; playing soccer on the weekends, hanging out with friends, riding my bike and exploring ponds and drainpipes after school. I played with random toys and picked up random comics at the local drugstore.3Did anyone call them “convenience stores” back then? I don’t remember 7-Elevens until later; for candy and comics, it was always Rexall Drugs or Walgreens. I didn’t really “collect” anything, just had the usual toys that you get as gifts from parents and relatives. My life was a pretty typical life for a kid in the 1970s. Until 1977, that is, when I had a life-changing event that was also typical for a (mostly male) kid of my generation: I saw Star Wars for the first time. And, like so many others, it changed me.

I can remember this like it was yesterday. It was late Summer, 1977. My family had just moved to a tiny Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama the previous month, and I felt kind of lost, having left the home and friends in San Antonio that I had known my entire brief life up to that point. Wanting to be a cartoonist when I grew up, I was obsessed with Disney.4Seriously, it was a good time to like Disney, even though it was dark days for the studio. That week alone, three Disney features were playing at the local theaters! The Rescuers was about to be released, and I was looking forward to seeing it like crazy; we didn’t go to the movies as a family that frequently when I was growing up, but my parents did drop my friends and me off at the matinees quite often.5In those days before home video, matinees played cartoons before the movies, and there was a steady stream of revival films that made the rounds. You might see something relatively new, or you might see an old James Bond or Disney live-action film. If I were lucky, a new movie would cycle quickly to the base theater where I could just bike to it. And the new movie that I really wanted to see was The Rescuers, as it would be the first new Disney animated film that I could see on the big screen when it was released. I had already started hanging out with the kid next door, Dean, who, luckily for me, was my age and even shared a wall with me in our duplex. So when he invited me to the movies one day with his family to see The Rescuers, I was very excited! We all piled in their van and drove off the base to the local theater. Except…we didn’t go to the local theater. We kept driving much farther. 6Montgomery is a relatively small city, and looking it up now, the theater was only 7 miles away, but for a little kid that never left the base, it seemed pretty far away from home. I trusted that Dean’s parents knew what they were doing, until his father asked me if I was excited that we were finally going to see that new blockbuster everyone was talking about: Star Wars.

This is the actual movie listing for the weekend I saw it. Click to enlarge.

I wasn’t. I wasn’t excited AT ALL. I wanted to see my cartoon! You see, back then I hated Sci-Fi (most likely the result of catching 2001 on tv a few years earlier. My 5-year-old self was not impressed)! So I just sulked and pouted quietly until we got there. And waited in line to see something I was barely even aware of; I’m pretty sure at that point in my sheltered life the only thing I knew was the title and nothing else. We finally got inside and took our seats. AND MY LITTLE MIND WAS BLOWN. I remember it so vividly, even today. I was always fidgety during movies but not this one. With this one I was transfixed. When Dean’s dad took the rest of the kids to the restroom during the attack on the Death Star7Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people?!? I waved him away. I don’t remember much about the year we spent in Alabama before moving back home. But I do remember seeing that movie. I think it’s tough for people who weren’t there at the right age to comprehend just what it was like to experience this thing; It was unlike anything else ever. 8Obviously, things didn’t stay that way. But it was like a dog-whistle that only young boys could hear. Much like the Twilight phenomenon that hit young girls the same way a decade ago. I walked into that movie wanting to be a cartoonist; I walked out needing to be a filmmaker. 9Fun story: I only thought I was destined to be a director until a real director, James Cameron, inadvertently talked me out of it when I was 23. Which is a longer story for another time.

So you could say that I liked Star Wars. And it was just the first step in a long journey. I still wasn’t a collector, yet. Most people know that there were no Star Wars toys to buy that year, but in a nutshell, Kenner started too late to have toys out for Christmas 1977 and instead sold an empty box with a coupon to be redeemed later for four action figures. I was blissfully unaware of this. In fact, I don’t think I expected there to be any Star Wars toys at all. 10I had some GI Joe figures and vehicles around this time, but my memories don’t include them. When I think about playing in those days I think about riding my bike and playing with frogs in the creeks. One night I was surprised by my Dad bringing home a knock-off lightsaber toy that was more or less a flashlight with a golf club protector on it that he picked up on his way home from work. I had a blast with it until it broke. But it wasn’t until right before we moved that I saw my first Star Wars toys; Dean caught me in front of our houses one day to show me that his grandmother had sent him a Luke Skywalker figure and his Landspeeder vehicle. We played with them for a bit right there, in the back of his family station wagon. I was blown away that I might be able to actually recreate scenes from the movie as I played. 11I can’t recall EVER seeing a movie more than once in the theater until I got my driver’s license, and Star Wars was no exception. For whatever reason, it just wasn’t something my family did. I did end up seeing it one more time before home video when I took my parents to see it at a drive-in during its 1979 re-release, which is also when I realized I needed glasses as it was very blurry to watch. This was around June 1978, nearly a full year since I saw Star Wars in the theater. And yet still…I didn’t get any Star Wars toys.

Dad at the Toy Box, circa mid-1950s, with an inset of a newspaper ad showing the logo as it was in the 1970s

By the end of Summer, we had moved back to San Antonio, and I went back to my old school12Total nightmare. No one “moves on” like fickle fourth graders. Some new kids supplanted me while I was gone, giving me plenty of time for toys by myself, angrily contemplating the lonely universe. But I’m not holding a grudge or anything. and picking up my old habits. I still talked about Star Wars all the time, indoctrinating my old friends at school and wearing down my family. I pretty much only got toys for birthdays and Christmas, with the occasional bribe for being good during hospital visits, etc. so it was the biggest surprise when I came home from school one day that Fall to find six of the first twelve Kenner Star Wars figures waiting for me on my bed! I don’t remember which ones they were now but otherwise, the memory is crystal clear in my mind. My mom had picked up all the ones she could find at the local AFB BX13Air Force Base Base Exchange, for non-military brats. Basically the on-base version of a small Walmart. Shortly after that, we found the other six figures and I had them all. Side note: when I got older I threw away all my childhood toys, but for some reason, I kept all the cardbacks these figures were packaged on. I still have those original twelve on the wall in my toy room
…minus some mail-away proof-of-purchases. Thanks, Mom! And that’s how it went for the next five years; I would get Star Wars toys only from then on; no more GI Joes, no Disney characters. And while I do still remember some of the exact moments where I bought a specific toy14The big ones that pop up: the day my Grandmother died in surgery in 1979 my Dad took me away from the hospital where everyone was waiting and uncharacteristically bought me two Star Wars playsets: Creature Cantina and Land of the Jawas. I remember being at her funeral and my cousin showing me the Empire Strikes Back Snowtrooper that he found that morning as we were getting into the cars to leave. I remember my dog eating my Greedo figure, and biking to Winn’s in a panic to find a replacement. And I remember finding my own first ESB figure, Han Solo in Hoth outfit, in Windsor Park Mall and begging my sister to buy it for me., what I mostly remember is the feeling of being in those stores, or traveling to those stores, and the events that precipitated each purchase. Now, I know that most kids of the era will first think of Toys R Us when they reminisce about toys and their childhoods, but for me, Toys R Us meant video games. The stores I associate with Star Wars and other toys of the 1970s/and early 1980s are ones like Winn's Variety Store
or TG&Y or the amazing Lionel Playworld, not to mention all the department stores that still had toy departments like Joske’s or Sears (home of the wonderful yearly Wishbook!) And above them all was our local mall toy chain, The Toy Box, operated by the Alwais family. As far back as I can remember, my Dad had been taking me to the Toy Box, where he would have nice conversations with the owners if they were around. I thought he was just very friendly15He was that, too. Dad would talk to anyone who seemed like they had a second to listen. but it was mainly because he himself had worked at the Toy Box in the 1950s as a teen. And so there was always a good excuse to visit the store and maybe come away with at least a new Han Solo or droid figure. In fact, I would get Star Wars ANYTHING
. But toys weren’t the only collecting gateway that Star Wars opened for me – comics beckoned, thanks once again to Mom.

Now, like any kid of the 1970s, I grew up reading comic books. They were on every newsstand, in every grocery and drugstore, and in every mom & pop store on a nice spinner rack. Comics were made to be read and thrown away; like most of the things you acquire as a child they were designed to be disposable. I wanted to be a cartoonist very badly, so newspaper comic strips and “funny books” are all I had the time for. These were very much kids comics, as best I can recall. Definitely no superhero stuff. Anyway, the comics most kids read back then are ones that today are sadly scarce: Harvey Comics
(Richie Rich, Casper, Hot Stuff, etc.), Disney Comics
(Donald Duck, Super Goof, Uncle Scrooge), and those little MAD compilation paperbacks
.16I seriously loved all the kind of disposable entertainment the newsstands used to offer. Weirdly, I can remember one specific line from a Jackie Joker’s comic (“It’s not Sci-Fi, It’s SCI-FUN!”) but pretty much nothing else from any of those stories. Superheroes really didn’t register on 7-year-old me, nor did any kind of fantasy characters. Until I saw (or course) a Star Wars comic on the newsstand
at the Mall in 1978; I was flabbergasted that there could be ALL-NEW stories about my new favorite movie! 17Yes, I was a pretty naive kid. The internet cured that. No matter, I was buying these things every time I saw them at the grocery store…for about a year. Still not collecting, though. At best I had a handful of random comics, often not even completing the story arcs that ran through multiple issues. As I naturally aged out of such things I stopped reading comics altogether, probably around the time I turned eight years old and we moved back to Texas. I was already a voracious reader of books by then and funny comics couldn’t compete with The Lord Of The Rings. And to be honest, I all but forgot about them. Until Christmas 1980, that is.

Christmas that year was like most any other: I got some shirts, a couple of Star Wars toys, and probably a book or record. But in my stocking Mom had put something that she probably found as an afterthought: a Star Wars comics. Number 44 to be exact. The final chapter of Marvel’s adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, the blockbuster sequel to Star Wars that had debuted a few months earlier in Summer 1980. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Mom had given me just a random issue of Star Wars (or any comic for that matter)? Would I have just read it and threw it away? In any case, that ain’t what happened. What happened was that I immediately went looking on local newsstands and spinner racks for the other issues that completed the adaptation. This was also the year that I entered middle school and made all-new friends18One of my newest friends was made the first day of class when he noticed that I had a Yoda Trapper Keeper and asked if I had seen the movie. That was all it took for a week-long discussion of the merits of the Star Wars sequel., some of whom were already collecting comics and let me know of a small used bookstore within bike riding distance: Bea's Variety Shop
.

This very cluttered storefront was full of all sorts of paperbacks, a few shelves of new hardback books, and a small room that had some comic longboxes on card tables along with lots of small boxes underneath the tables that were filled with trading cards of all varieties. For a 10-year-old kid like me, it was heaven. I couldn’t get to the newly created world of direct market comic shops in San Antonio unless my parents were going there for some errand already, but the grizzled, eccentric Korean War vet who owned the store (I never did know his name; the kids all called him “Bea” even though that was assuredly his wife’s name, or possibly the name of a store that he inherited) would make twice-weekly trips into town to pick up back issues for his store. He would also look for specific issues you might be missing and get them for you…for a modest markup, of course. I don’t remember specifically the first time I went in the store (although I’m pretty sure it was with either René Rivera or Jim Tracy, two new friends who were already into superheroes like The Hulk) but I surely remember the countless trips I made after that. And as a bonus, there was a video arcade (another fairly recent development in the early 1980s) along the way that I would stop at to waste any remaining quarters, even though I was technically not allowed to go there.19It would be years later before I realized that the constant haze of smoke inside was NOT due to cigarettes! Like I said, I was a pretty naive 11 year old. Even though it had only been 3 years since Star Wars comics began to be published it was surprisingly hard to catch-up. What was easier was to fill in the time I had in between new Star Wars issues with discovering NEW comics that I was now paying attention to in my hunt through grocery store racks
: Star Wars led to Spider-Man, Spider-Man led to X-Men, and X-Men opened up the entire world of Marvel Comics. It was a Golden Age to become a comic collector, ground zero for the stories that are now populating movies and video games in present-day pop culture.

And the heydey of the comic store was going strong in San Antonio! We had the Dungeon
(which started in a Fredricksburg Road flea market and eventually spread to three locations), Comic Quest, The Great Exchange, and Half Price Books. Plus every few months there would be a mini Comic Convention at Windsor Park Mall or some other location around town. At one point I was picking up nearly everything Marvel put out! 20And at $.35 each, it wasn’t a huge outlay when Marvel staggered the books so you had a handful of new titles every week.

These were the first issues or each of these titles that I remember picking up on the news stand.

The sheer novelty of getting new stories every week suddenly dominated my young psyche; I more or less stop watching network TV regularly during this time and spent my free hours reading countless comics with MTV as the unending soundtrack in the background. Toys, by this point, had taken a backseat. In the Summer of 1983 I was in the transition period between middle school and high school and it felt very natural to leave the toys behind, having picked up the first wave of Return of the Jedi figures but quickly losing the enchantment that colorful plastic would bring. Like many kids of my generation, I packed them all away in favor of videos games21Starting in 1980 I had an Odyssey2, TI-994A, and Atari 130XE. We’d joke that if I got a new video game system then the company would fold soon after. and my other new found collecting bug, classic rock n roll records.2245 singles were comparatively more expensive than a comic, at $2 each, so I had to really choose my music purchases sparingly until I got a job. I have many, many fond memories of rushing home from the comic shop with my newly purchased gems and putting on a Beatles or Buddy Holly album as I read the adventures of Daredevil or ROM, Space Knight. If I had picked up the latest issue at the local 7-Eleven23 Which would become Nullinson’s after 7-Eleven left San Antonio around 1983. The one within biking distance to me had a Tron arcade game in the back, where I wasted A LOT of quarters instead of buying comics. Priorities. I’d also come home with a Slurpee and a Chocolate Big Wheel ice cream sandwich, racing against the Texas heat to enjoy it in that idyllic cocoon of comic+snack+music that served to transport me to my own private world on many wonderful Summer afternoons.

I still did all the normal teen stuff: watched movies, went to concerts, drew, painted, and kept watching MTV. But comics were always there, somewhere on the periphery. One of the crowning achievements of my sophomore year was convincing the Senior (who also happened to be the head cheerleader) that drove us younger kids to a debate tournament to detour to a comic shop on the other side of town that we were near so my buddy Chris and I could pick up that week’s issues.24Chris and I met in middle school through mutual friends. He was definitely “cooler” than me, but we bonded in our little group as the only comics fans: Chris was the DC guy, I was the Marvel guy. We would trade comics as soon as we bought them to read each other’s issues immediately, then take ours home to read later. A very satisfying arrangement. And as much as I was a stereotypical geek25I carried a briefcase to class every day for a year instead of a backpack., as much as collecting comics wasn’t entirely mainstream back then, I never felt any nerd shame for being a fan. And I was openly enthusiastic enough about them that for our Senior Advanced English Class
picture my classmates asked me to bring a stack of them to school as props.

By the time high school was winding down, I was becoming less enchanted with comics. Music was still a big factor in my life, although not so much the typical 1980s fare; I was deep into classic rock and, as the decade waned, big band. With the advent of the key to youth’s freedom, my driver’s license, I found that exploring my larger environment, seeing movies both old and new each week, and delving deep into the many libraries of San Antonio all took precedence over collecting comic books. But I didn’t exactly quit collecting, either. While the stories and art took a downward turn as the 1990s loomed, there were the occasional gems that really showed the promise of the medium and garnered critical praise as well. This, plus sheer inertia, was enough to keep me amassing way too many books. I never really kept them in very nice shape
as I felt (and still feel) that these were disposable items meant to be read, not treasured. But the older I got, the more of an afterthought comics became. By the time I turned twenty years old, it was safe to say that I wasn’t a collector of anything, any more than you would call someone who subscribed to a newsmagazine a collector of “Time”. That state of being, however, was to be short-lived.

And now, a digression. There is another small part of the story that I need to tell, as it was, in fact, the lynchpin upon which my entire future rested.26Only in hindsight can you see the first domino that sets off the chain that paints the picture. Or something like that. When I was three years old my parents bought a house and moved our family from housing on the local Air Force Base into the suburbs of San Antonio nearby. We had already moved a few times and I didn’t have any friends yet; it was the summertime with the school year still a month away. So I whiled away my time just playing with sticks and hanging out in my new backyard. I was content to enjoy my solitary pursuits and enact adventures in my head (times have not changed). It wasn’t long before my Mom thought I should be out doing something productive and out of her hair27At Three! Boy, were those different times. so she marched me across the street to where a little boy was playing in his own backyard and made us be friends. And friends we would remain, all the way into high school.

Richie and me in fourth grade.

Born just four days apart (I was the older one), Richie and I were fairly inseparable for most of our youth outside of that one year I spent in Alabama. When I became obsessed with Star Wars, he started collecting the toys, too (even though he hadn’t seen it yet). When I dove into the world of comics, he started making parallel trips to Bea’s Variety Shop, and sometimes competed for the very same back issues that I was trying to find28I’ll never forget “Bea” offering to let me buy Spectacular Spider-Man #12 one day, even though he had specifically picked it up for Richie. You’re damn right that I bought it, too! I believe that such betrayals are the stuff of a deep, lasting friendship. But as close as we were for so many years, Richie and I were actually not very much alike. Where I disappeared into the stories and obsessively learned about the creators of movies and comics, he saw them more as things to collect and preserve; my comics were randomly stacked in misshapen piles, to be returned to again and again while his were bagged and boarded in longboxes, sorted in order and read only once then never touched again.29Because acid in your fingers will degrade the paper, man! He treated his toys the same way, arranged pristinely on shelves and rarely played with.

As we grew older we also grew apart. Middle school had introduced new friends (although we remained part of the same groups) and high school broadened the pool even more, especially once cars were factored into the equation. Our groups of friends split and split again, and while I became “popular”30I was actually having this discussion with an old friend the other day. I moved in and out of the many cliques in our school, not exactly part of the “popular crowd” but friendly with everyone. And somehow ended up part of the handful of people planning both the 20th and 30th class reunions!, Richie was more withdrawn and increasingly active with just a handful of people. Still, we remained living directly across the street from each other so we did see one another quite often.

And we were friends all along, if no longer “best friends”. It was in this vein that he gave me a present for Christmas in 1984, our sophomore year of high school. As stated above, I was a few years past buying toys at that point, but was still picking up comics every week like clockwork, something that he had grown out of himself.31As an aside, it’s worth pointing out here that while my generation of comic collectors grew up to dominate the world of today’s pop culture, they were still very much deep nerd territory in the early 1980s. But then, popularity aside, recall that I also proudly carried a briefcase to class for one year. One of us was definitely more concerned with appearances than the other. This present consisted of three action figures based on comic heroes: Batman, Green Lantern, and Aquaman. I’m guessing, since we no longer knew each other all that well, that he fell back on the one thing he did know still about me: comic books. Now, I knew who these characters were, of course, thanks to years of merchandise and cartoons invading the public consciousness. But I almost strictly read Marvel Comics at the time (these were all DC Comics characters) and wasn’t even aware they were making superhero toys. So I responded to the gift with a half-hearted “thank you” and moved on to whatever party there was to go to (there was ALWAYS a party going on somewhere in 1984). The figures were put into a drawer and forgotten.32Totally not unusual as I often tossed things into drawers or boxes, only to rediscover them years later in puzzlement.

Somewhat ironically, I’d work for one of the first Disney Stores right after high school33Which is the subject of a future article that is in the works! and that led to working for Toy R Us soon after as it was the closest type of store for me to transition to…even though I still wasn’t paying attention to toys. By the time I got into college, comics had been replaced by an insatiable curiosity for “new” – new art, new stories, new things. Movies were definitely taking over for me, with VHS rental stores springing up all over giving me ample opportunity to broaden the depth of my knowledge past what basic cable had to offer and trips to the library to research classic film history were a near-daily occurrence after my classes were through. If you had asked me if I was interested in toys during this time in my life I would have been hard-pressed to name a single current toy line on store shelves34I did still hit the toy stores now and then, but it was mainly for the awesome video games like Atarisoft and the new Nintendo System, or even recognize that being a toy designer was an actual career that one could aspire to become. And had all things stayed the same, I would imagine that my life would have turned out very differently indeed from the path that I had been on, and in retrospect, I can say that it would have been probably not for the better, either.

In any case, two events happened to change the course of my life, both of them related; the first one was probably the single-most impactful thing to happen to me up to that point: one night a few months before our 20th birthdays, my lifelong best friend Richie killed himself. I was visiting a high school buddy in Houston when it happened, but we still lived across the street from each other. I remember my mother calling me in Houston in tears and my first thought being that something had happened to my sister, who recently had moved back home. And then the relief I felt mixed with a different kind of grief when she told me what had happened. I wish I could say that it was a shock, but it wasn’t. The last times I talked to him, Richie had been both angry and depressed. To this day I don’t know for sure why he did it, though. We still saw each other occasionally; where I was foundering in college he had excelled, graduating in three years with a business degree. I don’t know what his future plans were going to be, we never discussed those things. Although he wasn’t the first person in our school to die young35He was actually the 15th person that I knew from school to die since our Junior year. It was getting to the point that we were taking morbid bets on who was next, but he would end up being the last for over a decade. he was definitely the one who had been closest to me. For much of my childhood, he had been my ONLY close friend; it very much worried me that I lost the one person that I could reminisce with about those days and that once I forgot something the memory would be gone forever. I wasn’t overly sad, though. We had been estranged enough by this point that if anything it deepened my already fatalist bent and made me even less serious about my own future, expecting to die at any time from that point on.

Into this atmosphere came event number two and of the two this one by far may have been the most important day of my life, even if I can only recognize it as such from my current vantage point. A few weeks after Richie’s funeral my comic-collecting buddy, Chris, was hanging out at my house, reading comics and listening to music. Per his usual habit, Chris was aimlessly rifling through my stuff and starting pulling out junk that was in the bottom of my fully loaded desk drawers. As I’ve said before, Chris was the DC Comics fan, and when he found three very specific action figures in the back of one drawer he got very excited.36This would have a better outcome than the time he found my beloved Patrol Dewback toy in my closet and proceeded to paint its eyes with white-out out of boredom. I was not amused.It was the Kenner Super Powers figures that Richie had given me back in 1984, exposed to the light maybe for the first time in years. Of course, Chris wanted to take them. And had he found them at any other time, I would have given them to him. Gladly! But these might have been the only things I still had that tied me to Richie (I tended to throw stuff away pretty easily growing up, and while I would soon get in the habit of NEVER throwing anything away, at the moment these figures were all I could think of to remind me of my one-time best friend). Chris wasn’t thrilled with that answer; he understood about the Richie aspect of it all, but I didn’t even read DC Comics! Surely, the figures were better off with him? But I didn’t budge. Who knows what our lives would be like if I had? But I didn’t. And he left, saying he’d find his own DC figures.

And you know what, dear reader? That’s exactly what he did. Chris remembered seeing toys at a local flea market that we used to ride our bikes to37In fact, I used to get old issues of Playboy from a dealer at this Flea Market, who probably shouldn’t have been selling them at $.50 each to a 13-year-old kid. I eventually had a nearly complete run from the mid-1960s to the 1980s before selling them all back to him for $35 to go on a date. Ha ha! The circle of life. and went there that weekend to see if he could find those same figures. But he didn’t just find those…he found Superman! The Flash! GREEN ARROW! Wait, what?? They made a Green Arrow figure!?!? And so it was: Chris came straight to my house in a fit of excitement for a world that neither of us had known to exist. And once we got our first taste, toy collecting became a mania. The first thing we did was scour our parents’ houses for our childhood toys: nada. Apparently, we threw them ALL away as neither one of us could find anything more than a couple of random Star Wars weapons that had been left behind as the rest raptured their way to the great garbage dump in the sky. But no matter; the world of flea markets and garage sales in 1990 was ripe for the taking, not just for Super Powers action figures but also for all the Star Wars toys we had or never had. All of it was there, all of it relatively inexpensive. Heck, I was again working at Toys R Us during the holidays and my store still had Return of the Jedi PrestoMagix and Ewok kites for sale! So that became our afternoons and weekends that Summer: circle and map all promising garage sales in the San Antonio area, hit the two or three flea markets, check for old stock in out of the way toy stores and comic shops, and make road trips to Corpus Christi, Austin, Waco, even as far as Houston to attend the nascent Convention circuit, all to look for “old” toys.38At the time, these seemed ANCIENT to our young eyes, but the reality was that we were chasing merchandise that was at most a decade removed from stores, with the more recent items having been for sale while we were obliviously attending high school. After a brief period of time where we went into each location together then split up to compete for the same toys, we decided that it would make a lot more sense to separate our interests: I would collect superheroes, Chris would collect Star Wars.

And now, another digression: of all my friends that I’ve made over the years, Chris will always remain the one closest to me. In no small part because he’s the only one who I knew growing up that was equally excited and passionate about comics and toys and for the same reasons. To have that tether in high school was a wonderful thing. We would get unabashedly excited about finding new things old and new, always ready to explore a new city by first finding the comic shops. Over the years we were roommates four times39At his wedding, he leaned over and said to me, “I just can’t believe we’re not going to be roommates again.” While there’s always a chance in the future, 18 year later he’s still happily married with a great family, and I couldn’t be happier for him. and even when he wasn’t collecting it was great to never worry about what my roommate would think about coming home to a pile of toys and comics thrown around the living room. Ok, back to the story.

You have to realize, this was all pre-Internet as we know it. Sure, there were collectors online and on local BBS services, but for us, we were operating in the dark. Our memories couldn’t be fully trusted, there were no resources for what got made, and every time we found a new Mint In Package toy it was almost more exciting to just look at the cross-sell photos, either on the backs of figure cards or in tiny pamphlets included with boxed items, and these colorful print materials would shine a bit more light on the toys we had never heard of before. Dr. Fate! Mr. Miracle! Amanaman! Romba!! Those names (and many others) would become momentary grails as we searched through bins piled high with loose figures and answered ads for “children’s toys” in hopes of finding gold amongst the Barbies and Legos. There was no nostalgia industry back then, no articles about toys of our youth, no magazines dedicated to the pursuit of shiny things from the near past. So we treasured each new word-of-mouth building block in our toy history database. For every “My neighbor got a rocket-firing Boba Fett in the mail!” that we would hear we’d also find an odd gem of information like when we ran into a district Judge at a Corpus Christi doll show that was buying up all the loose superhero figures he could find in the dollar bins. “Why do you need six beat-up Green Lanterns?”, we asked him. He told us he repainted them as new characters to display in his comic shop. This kind of thing (“Custom figures?? That’s so cool!”) was what kept us going past the sheer nostalgia factor of it all. And our timing was impeccable; we weren’t the only neophyte collectors entering into the nascent world of toys. A whole generation of young adults was dawning that saw NEW toys as something to buy and cherish for their own sake, not out of nostalgia for their youth. It was a 6 am trip to Waco, Tx that started us on the path to purchasing brand-new action figures in stores and not just hunting down old ones. We had been collecting for around six months at that point and had seen a newspaper ad for a “Toys & Comics” show in Waco and we knew by that point that if you didn’t get there first you weren’t going to make the big score. Waco was over 2 hours north of our homes (the national speed limit was 55mph in those days) and for young folks such as us, waking up to get there first was a cruel and unusual hardship that we endured strictly due to the lure of finding a new grail. We even called ahead to the show organizer to verify that we would indeed have a shot at plastic riches. But when we arrived at the hotel that was mentioned in the ad the marquee mocked us with one lone message: “Welcome Power Boaters of America!” We sleepily made our way inside, slowly acknowledging the evidence that no toy show would be held here today (or at least not one worth our time). The organizer was set up on a folding table at the end of the entrance hall. When we inquired about the show that he had confirmed over the phone he just shook his head, “No toys. Cards.” And sure enough, tucked away in the corner were a couple of tables where trading card dealers were unloading stacks of assorted cards for the denizens of Waco to peruse.

Dejected, we left the hotel. However, we couldn’t bear to have driven all that way just to turn around empty handed. There must be some sort of toys to buy, somewhere in town. Now, this was on a Sunday in Texas in 1990. The Blue Laws had recently been partially repealed, but most stores in small towns would still be closed that morning. Toys R Us, on the other hand, would open at 10 am. We just had to bide our time at a Denny’s or driving around before we could get our hands on those riches. Now, you may ask yourself, why would we stay longer than it would take to drive back, just to shop at a chain that I actually worked for? Well, in those days not only did most department stores still have deep stockrooms, but they also didn’t turn over stock the way our modern inventory systems allow them to. There was a chance (not a good one, mind you) that a place like Waco might have toys that were five or more years old still hanging around, as we had made some good scores at Walmarts and 5&10 stores in towns in the middle of the countryside. It was not destined to be, though. The only thing awaiting us for all our trouble was the same brand-new toys that we could have found in San Antonio. And so, as to not leave empty-handed, we decided to go ahead and buy some new toys for the first time: Chris selected some random GI Joe figures and a vehicle and I decided on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, having owned a few issues of their comic when they debuted as a black & white Daredevil ripoff in 1986. They had since become kiddie friendly cartoons and as such were now making inroads into the toy arena in a big way. All of these random choices made on this trip changed collecting for both of us; by the time we landed back home I was now fully convinced that collecting Ninja Turtles was the way to go40Three years later I would sell all my Ninja Turtles figures to a little kid and his grandma for the $13 the kid had on him. I was never really that interested in them., while Chris was seeing the boondoggle of collecting for what it was, an overwhelming all-consuming obsession. It wouldn’t be long before he made the decision to stop collecting and “sell” me all his Star Wars toys for a nominal $15, with the proviso that he could get them back for the same amount once he was ready to resume collecting.41Spoiler: he never did resume collecting, but I sent him the entire vintage figures collection about 15 years later for his young daughters when I moved away from Los Angeles. They had been in storage for years by that point. So now I had new toys to collect and at least two vintage lines to keep going. Chris still occasionally accompanied me on toy runs for the vicarious thrill of it, or I might get a frantic phone call at any given moment from him (“I was just in the Circus World in Ingram Park Mall and overheard a kid saying that he found a Panda Kahn figure! They made a Panda Khan?!?”) but collecting from this point on would become more of a solitary pursuit for me, especially once I moved away from home. At the same time, the collecting universe was opening wide, with upstart companies like Toy Biz and Playmates targeting collectors specifically with lines such as X-Men and Star Trek, respectively, toy expos becoming more common42In Austin I regularly dealt with Harry Knowles for vintage toys, well before he would become infamous with Ain’t It Cool News, and magazines like Tomart’s and Wizard popping up to cater to collectors.

I was on the cusp of it all. While I can’t claim to be one of the first modern collectors, I was ahead of the wave of most of the mania that was coming in the 1990s and beyond. And in 1992 I discovered something that would put me at the forefront of the collecting world, at least for a while: I entered the Internet for the first time. But like the other pivotal moments in my life related above, it was a distinct chain of events that let me be somewhat ahead of the curve. In January 1992 I was going to college at the University of Texas and working for the Texas House of Representatives after class each day. I was still collecting comics, but solely out of inertia from having “complete” collections of many titles: Spider-Man, X-Men, Star Wars, etc. The curse of collecting a monthly comic is that it can NEVER be complete as there is a new issue every month to add. But fate was about to relieve me of that burden; one cold, January night I came home to my apartment after the Special Session had adjourned for the day43Normally, I left the Capitol around 6 pm every single day. But when the House is in session, no one leaves until they adjourn, which can often last late into the night. about 1 am in the morning. I was greeted by an unusual sight, water running down my front steps, water that was originating from the crack under my front door! I opened the door to find about four inches of water filling my entire apartment; a pipe had burst under the bathroom sink and had apparently been flowing all day. After slipping and falling in said water, then getting a shock from grabbing the non-grounded bathroom pipe that had a current running through it (did I mention that I lived in a very cheap establishment in a less than savory part of town?) I went door to door until I found the maintenance man and together we got the water turned off. What was now facing me was the ruin of nearly everything that touched the floor…including a number of longboxes containing the fruits of over ten years worth of comic collecting. Richie apparently had the right idea all along, as I did not bag any of my comics, leaving nearly all of them a soggy mess along the bottom edges. And while my 22-year-old self did feel momentary panic at this first personal disaster that is a rite of passage into adulthood, what followed soon after was a blessed wave of relief. I no longer had to make a decision to quit collecting comics, it was made for me. Never once did I entertain the thought of trying to rebuild that collection. Through the magic of insurance I received a windfall of around $14,000 for the whole collection44If the flood had happened a year later at the hight of the comic speculator market, but before the immediate crash, the value would have been nearly triple what I received! As is the comics were still readable enough that the insurance company let me donate them all to the Ronald McDonald house for sick kids, a total win-win in my book! and I used a lot of it to buy my first personal computer. Which was good timing, as shortly thereafter one of my professors idly asked at the end of class one day, “Does anyone want an email account?”

I didn’t even know anyone who used email at the time, but I jumped at the opportunity. He added us to his school account which came with access to the internet. At that point, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and could be viewed as text-based browsing, mainly using a program called “Lynx” (for “links”, get it?) and searchable with tools like Archie, Jughead, and Gopher. I was instantly captivated by this new world, especially as I was directly linked to the internet and not constricted by a portal such as Prodigy or Compuserve. Email, USENET groups, and the nascent WWW all opened up a treasure trove of toy information and a collecting community that I was unaware of at the time. Even so, the best was yet to come, when in June 1993 the Mosaic browser was launched, creating the first graphic interface to the Web. I had just transferred to Texas Tech in Lubbock at the end of that Summer and being stuck in a small town with nothing to do was the perfect time to become immersed in the birth WWW as we know it. Between online exploration and the launch of the game Doom I rarely left my apartment outside of going to class or to work (Toys R Us, yet again!), except, of course, to hunt for toys.

What did toys mean to me, anyway, at that point? I had since acquired all the figures for the original Star Wars and Super Powers lines. It was no longer about nostalgia, but there was a very keen curiosity about the process of manufacturing toys themselves. I became ravenous to figure out everything about how they were made, and the history behind them. From Marx to Mego, from Kenner to MacFarlane, I learned about the people behind the toys, who sculpted what and what exactly went on in a Chinese factory. And the internet just broadened my already wide net of collectors, each one passing along a bit of information that would let me assemble the entire picture. But collecting toys became a means in itself, with no end in sight. And for a long while, that seemed preferable to a short-lived toyline. It was comics all over again. Yet, there was something about seeing a physical representation of characters that you love, all lined up together in one big colorful display. It could be as intoxicating as the best drug…and just as addictive.

Toy collecting was taking over my life by that point ( and my apartment
). And I’ll never forget when my life-changing epiphany hit me: I was sitting in a country buffet restaurant with my family in Fredricksburg, Tx as we visited my grandfather and I suddenly realized that there was so much information that I had gathered about toy lines over the previous years that wasn’t available. Why not just put it all online for free? Now, from the vantage point of 2018 this seems like a pretty basic thought, but in 1993 there were next to no toy resources. There were toy groups on USENET (rec.toys.misc, which would soon branch off to many offshoot groups) and a handful of targeted websites with scattered toy info. It goes without saying that Star Wars was already in good hands with guys like Gus Lopez. And Eric Myers had just started his first website (E3) that doled out general collecting advice, but there wasn’t much out there for Superhero toys. So after teaching myself HTML and dabbling in Microsoft Paint, I was ready to launch my first attempt at a website, loosely using a cartoon character I created in high school, Uncle Grim. It was basically just a page of links (as was much of the web at the time). But it didn’t take me long to follow it up with a series of archives that laid out as much information that I could about toylines that were dedicated to Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the centerpiece, Kenner Super Powers, the very first toy line that I had started collecting. I became the sole noted “expert” for the Super Powers line for many years, eventually breaking news of unproduced toys that the collecting public at large had never heard of45With gracious thanks to Jason Liebig and James Sawyer, among others, who trusted me enough to really do the due diligence in presenting this information., writing magazine articles, and in books about the toy lines for Marvel Comics, and even appearing in the special features of the Super Friends DVDs!

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Web took precedence in my life from that moment on, over school, relationships, work…everything except toy collecting, which fed it as sort of a Mobius loop. After graduating with a degree in Mass Communications I was hard pressed to find a career. I moved to Houston to work in Industrial video for the oil companies, but with an overall industry slump in the late 1990s some months I could only count on a couple of days of shooting. I worked on local commercials, Xmas specials for shock radio shocks, you name it. But the free time was welcome (if not profitable) as by that time I had merged my website with Eric Myers’ site to create Raving Toy Maniac, the first real online toy magazine that featured archives, news, collecting tips, humor, and much more. We were featured on CNN46Not to name-drop or anything, but over the years my work has also been featured by AdWeek, TheTodayShow.com, MSNBC.com, Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, Business Insider, io9, /FILM, The Licensing Letter, Wired.com, Gizmodo, Fark, Geekologie, Digg, Boing-Boing, Cnet, G4, and the official Star Wars blog, among others (not to mention NRO *and* NPR!, we were the first website to get press credentials for the International Toy Fair, and we hosted the first toy panels at San Diego Comic Con. More than that, working on the site raised my profile enough that when a college buddy introduced me to his friend that made fast food toys, it played a huge part in being offered a job with his company, even though I had no practical experience designing toys. It didn’t take me long to excel, though; within a year of getting hired, I was living at a factory in China overseeing the creation of Life-Size Star Wars characters for Pepsi’s promotion of The Phantom Menace. It was astounding to me that less than a decade after beginning to collect toys that I was now working on merchandise for a new Star Wars movie, visiting Skywalker Ranch multiple times and working directly with Lucasfilm. To say it was a dream come true was an understatement47When I first started designing toys I naively told my CEO that the two things I really wanted were to visit Skywalker Ranch, as he had just come back from there, and to see toys being made in China. Within 4 months I was doing both many times over! Be careful what you wish for.

It was, however, very overwhelming and took all my focus. So much so that I stepped away from Raving Toy Maniac and much of the web, starting ToyOtter.com as a way to house my online content but not as a site that I would need to update more than once every year or so48In 2005 I co-founded Action Figure Insider with Daniel Pickett, but took a backseat after only five years as my “real job” became too intense to divide my creative energies anymore. Getting old sucks!. I never stopped collecting toys, though. Even as I moved to Los Angeles to design toys for Wendy’s for many years, the toy collection kept growing and growing. My original reasons for collecting, vintage Star Wars and Super Powers figures, had long since been completed but the collector boom brought with it an endless pantheon of new toys to collect every year. No longer were a handful of action figures released every Christmas season; now you had Comic Con and Toy Fair and multiple other conventions throughout the year to break the news of new toylines and also designer toys that catered to adults with a lot of disposable cash. Adults like me! And buy them I did. Thousands of them. And while I was not the biggest collector around BY FAR, I still found myself with boxes and boxes of toys piled up in my apartments, only displaying a few at a time as each month would bring more and more new toys. When I finally left L.A. to move back to Texas I used the opportunity to pack up a lot of toy lines like my vintage Star Wars collection and send them off to friends who now had kids that could play with them, as they were originally intended. My move back to Texas was inspired in large part by the desire to own a house for two reasons: to have a yard for dogs and to have a dedicated toy room. And I did!49My dogs kick ass! Best decision I ever made. I left the toy industry and moved into marketing and promotions ( still working on some big names in the bargain
), and put together a nice toy room that was literally wall-to-wall toys. And that’s how things have remained for the past ten years. Have a look at the toy room below. For the most part, I’ve kept toys out of the rest of the house.

Which brings us back to today. And the concept of inertia. I still consider myself lucky that my apartment flooded when it did in 1991, rescued from my comic collecting by fate50Just because I stopped being a comic collector does not mean I stopped being a comic reader, however. I still pick up the occasional trade book or reprints of classic stories I used to own.. A fate that indirectly led to my career, more than any overt influence that I asserted in any case. But no such “lucky break” has appeared to rescue me from the toy collecting that had dominated my life. Waaay at the beginning of this tale, I stated that in my mind I had always thought of my high school years as the period of my life that was “normal”, when I wasn’t collecting toys but instead pursuing many different interests. But looking back I see now that it was an aberration, and nearly 30 years have gone by without a toyless day among them. Sure, I’ve divested myself of large amounts of toys since moving back to Texas, mainly in the form of donations to homeless kids. Sure, I’ve rebought some of those donations out of momentary itches of nostalgia, only to pack them away again the minute that itch has been scratched. I’ve learned that having a toy room is a relatively meaningless endeavor if you’re the only person seeing it; my office at work slowly became my public showcase
as I acquired ever more unique and colorful toys for the sole purpose of delighting visitors. Since leaving the toy industry, my personal painting and sculpting dwindled down to nothing, and my involvement in any online activities was long gone, having been supplanted as “the” expert over a decade earlier mainly from lack of participation on my part. For ten years toy collecting has become a long, grey slog. An exercise in inertia, punctuated by momentary excitement of something new that fades into routine. I look back at how the initial rush of collecting led to creating new memories and each new item led to more knowledge. But today, with the internet, the knowledge is already there for anyone with a phone. There is no longer a hunt or an exploration, there is only just shopping. And after 30 years, what is left to accomplish? Is it the acquiring that powers the enjoyment of collecting or is it the possession of a material item itself? I used to think it was the latter but in the past year, I’ve come around to thinking it’s the former. And possibly creating my own artworks might be even more fulfilling than buying someone else’s. That’s something I lost sight of at some point in my life.51One thing I’m not really touching on is the creation of custom action figures, which IS turning collecting into art, something I started doing early on but stopped until just recently. But it’s too deep a topic to cover in just a few sentences, so stay tuned!

And what of the opportunity cost that collecting withdraws? The constant pursuit of a collection takes time, especially when it’s never-ending. The participation in a support community for the hobby takes time as well, and when you factor social media into it it can become near all-consuming. If I had all this time back, could I be spending it in possibly a better way? How much of a collection is too much? And is there a point to having a collection if it never leaves your storage unit? These are questions that haunt me with greater frequency as I get older. Before, it was easy to divide my time between collecting, reading, painting, and school. But time is a more precious commodity now, and I’m not sure the trade-off is worth the cost any longer. I guess it comes down to one thing: WHY do I still collect toys? If the answer is just because I always have, then I’m not sure that it’s the right answer.

What I’ve come to realize over the past few years is that my collecting life is split up into two nearly equal parts: one, that nearly ALL my collecting memories are from the first half of the journey- all the people that I met, all the websites that I worked on, the big events, etc. all took place during those heady first 12 years or so when I was deep into the game. Probably the single biggest thing from the ENTIRE second half has been the connecting with great folks in the toy community through all the new and exciting social media channels. But I see very few of them in the real world, and many of them I met in real life much earlier. And two, for the whole first 15 years I was collecting toys I was always focused on the “big goal”: to have a dedicated toy room to house everything I had been dragging everywhere. I moved 16 times in 12 years, and my apartments had no choice but to house toys freaking everywhere, with most of them in boxes
. My house now has very few toys that aren’t in the toy room, by design. Once I got my toy room, however…it lost its charm real quick. I live too far out from town to have many visitors and why have this room packed full of colorful goodness if not to show it off? I rarely have a reason to just walk in the room and stand there looking around. What ended up happening is that my work office became my de facto toy room and visitors were delighted by it. But once that went away a couple of years ago and those toys came back home, having the sheer AMOUNT of toys that 30 years of non-stop collecting brings just stopped making sense to me. It seems bizarre to me that I’ve now had my house and toy room for nearly as long as it was from when I started collecting to when I got the house! And to be honest, 30 years ago I never thought I’d still be collecting 30 years later because all the toy lines I liked at the time were small and finite.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love toys. But not “a” toy. It’s the thought of them, the process, the craftsmanship that goes into the manufacturing that still holds my interest. But the actual toys themselves? I’m not sure. I look back on these memories that I’ve written down and what stands out is that the excitement and the passion are all over those first ten years of collecting. The years that led to my career, and my friendships, and my legacy, such that it is, in the toy world. When I first started collecting toys, the collection was a finite thing. Toys were produced maybe for 2-3 years and then the line would be canceled and the company would move on to something else. But then something happened…WE happened. A whole generation of collectors, not kids, became the focus and from that point on you have so many toys that have NEVER had a break since: Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, etc. have all been relatively unbroken for 20 plus years. And the generations growing up now did not produce the same amount of collectors that Gen X did; I think it’s because my generation collected out of nostalgia, but it’s hard to be nostalgic for something that never goes away. And it’s hard to stop collecting a collection that never stops.

Or is it? A few months ago I wrote about how seeing a young YouTube star kind of woke me up from my mental stupor. I felt like I was seeing myself, age 16, and the passion I then had for creating. It woke me up enough to slowly start creating again for myself, not just for my job. And it’s not an exaggeration that I looked around and wondered why I had so many possessions that only I could see (having lost my office to an open floor plan recently, most of my toys were once again in boxes) and immediately packed away at least 1/2 of my toy room
. I’ve always justified giving away large amounts of my collection and not putting it into storage with a variation of a classic riddle: “If I keep them sealed in boxes in my closet, and then give them away at some point, are they still not in my closet?” Meaning, if I’m not actively seeing them every day, but still have the memory of owning them…is that not the same thing? Lord knows I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of every toy I’ve ever owned. What else could I do with them? And I now ask myself this: do I still need to own these items? Is the fun in the collecting or is it in the possession? Do they, in fact, possess me and in doing so take up the time I could be spending on other pursuits? And without a natural disaster to let me off the hook, do I have the willpower to get rid of most (all?) of my toys? Life is giving me a natural deadline: I turn 50 years old next Summer. And having put all of my collecting history into words, I guess that’s the only question that remains:

I know, I know. It’s been a long time since my last article and now the first new thing I’m writing is a music review? And not just a music review, but a review of an album by a 15-year-old YouTube star? Well, yeah. That’s exactly what I’m doing. And I’m just as surprised as anyone!

While I would never claim to be as much of a melomaniac as some of my peers, I am an avid listener with a healthy iTunes library of music from the 1930s to the 2000s. From Gershwin to Grizzly Bear. From Ella to NWA. From classic Disney Soundtracks to Hamilton (The Musical)…well, you get the picture. But even though I swore I would never be one of those people who weren’t on top of the latest bands and trends, for some reason my audio collection stops around 2012. I think St. Vincent was the last artist that made me take notice and go on a run finding her entire output to that point (and isn’t it a great feeling when you have those kinds of sudden discoveries?) But when it comes to what’s being played today I don’t know Billie Eilish from Billy Eichner. 52In part I think my new car was responsible; the presets for Sirius XM only had six spots and of course I had them set chronologically from the 1940s to the 1990s as any rational person would. Why am even I telling you this?

Anyway, as a charter member of Generation X, I’ve been bred to be cynical and unimpressed by pretty much everything. And I am! It’s served me well in life!53Not true. So with the advent of podcasts to keep me company during my 2+ hour daily commute I didn’t realize that I was missing new music. Truth be told, I was dismissing much of it out of hand as “American Idol” bred pop. And while I’m being honest, it wasn’t just music that had grown stagnant. Life, in general, has been at a standstill for many years: same job, same house, same dogs, same friends, same routine. Every day. Every year. Rinse, repeat. The only non-work creative thing I’ve done in ages was a quick, barely fleshed-out game concept. 54 Although I still want to make this game!

So that’s the way it was as of a few weeks ago when a YouTube clip hit my Facebook feed; a cover of “La Vie En Rose” by some kid in her bedroom. 55 I should mention here that I love cover versions, especially songs from the 1950s and 1960s. Somehow we lost the days when major artists would routinely cover hit songs or turn more obscure songs into hits with the covers. It would be commonplace to see multiple people have the same song out at the same time. Thank God YouTube artists have brought this tradition back around. If I didn’t like the song so much (and already owned so many covers of it) I never would have watched this:

Adorable, right? And when YouTube suggested I watch another of her videos, a cover of Panic! At The Disco, I was intrigued. 56 Yes, I did listen to Panic! At The Disco when they first hit. They were inescapable on alternative stations, and their Musical and Pop influences made them stand out, especially on their second album which totally aimed for “Beatlesque” and ran with it. But then there was a nasty breakup, and I followed Ryan Ross over to his new group, The Young Veins, and holy cow did this kid want to be part of the British Invasion! But I digress. And then I watched a few more videos, finding this young girl, Chloe Moriondo, more endearing with each one. The covers were perfectly fine, if uneven, as some fit her voice better than others 57 And here’s where I have to say I HAD NO IDEA who most of the people being covered were. #OldMan but what shone through was Moriondo’s very distinct personality. And about that time she announced that she had an album for sale online, so I bought a copy on iTunes…and forgot about it. 58 I do this a lot, actually. Not having kids or anything I tend to reflexively support people who impress me or donate to GoFundMes for those in need. Because that could be me one day and karma and all that. About a week later I’m having to spend my Sunday painting germs for work (don’t ask) and fired up iTunes to play while I paint. I honestly hadn’t expected to do much more than skim this kid’s songs and move on to my standard random playlists. And then it starting playing.

I ended up letting it loop the whole 7 or 8 hours that I was painting. I was not expecting to hear such a polished effort and one, on the whole, that was fairly different from the covers Moriondo posts. Let’s get the caveat out of the way: this is the first work from a 15-year old artist.60I really hate myself for including a caveat; It’s not like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is a work of great lyrical complexity (to say nothing of the songs The Beatles were really writing when they were 15!) But many of Moriondo’s songs feel more ambitious than pap like Justin Bieber going “Baby Baby Baby” and more experience will help her hit the goals she’s aiming for a bit better. And it shows…but only in the ways that a more mature singer or composer can draw on experience to create a richer composition. To be fair, I don’t listen to original music made by High School kids that often. But I have known many musicians throughout my life, and I can’t say that hearing any of their music has ever hit me quite the way this album, Rabbit Hearted, has. 61 I’m so sorry, you all know I love your music! From the very first song, Waves, it’s obvious that there is a dark undercurrent running through the album (which, if you know me, you know how that speaks to my black heart.). Even before Moriondo posted “liner notes” on the YouTube posts for each song it was evident that these songs were very personal and dealt with subject matter from her own life. Yeah, that means that you have the usual high school subject matter of Unrequited Love and Joy Rides62Still universal subjects!, but there is a higher concentration of themes of Anxiety, Disassociation/Depression, and above all else, this pervasive sleep imagery that conjures a mental picture of both the highs of dreams and lows of insomnia. And in the title itself, Moriondo refers to anxious feelings being analogous to rabbits’ hearts beating super fast (i.e., someone who is always anxious would be “rabbit hearted”).

You might think that means these songs would be downers. But no! I tell you; many of them are quite upbeat. Using mainly a ukulele 63 I tried to learn the ukulele a few years ago when it was all the rage. It’s now a nice present to my co-worker’s kids. C’est la vie. and layers of her voice, Moriondo creates an incredibly dense sense of atmosphere to these songs, making them almost haunting. Usually, when I hear young artists singing with a single instrument I think about how much richer it could sound with a band or full orchestration. But these songs sound perfect already. And with nearly 25 years of enervating sleep problems and my own intense bouts of stress, songs like “Exhausted” spoke to me very deeply. And “Stagnant” could very well be a snapshot of my life, in general, these days. 64 Ha ha. Kill me now. “Spaceland” isn’t the work of someone who has read about neurological disorder it’s the work of someone who has lived it, sketched out in particular, vivid language. And it sounds beautiful at the same time. The very best of these songs have clever turns of phrase throughout; again, these are incredible for a first effort. And that’s not to diminish the craft of these songs, just acknowledging Moriondo is still very young, and it’s reflected in her lyrics. 65 Any mentions of being in Math Class or catching the school bus was a stark reminder of the reality that I’m a 49-year-old listening to a 15-year-old. So much fun. Sigh. But the hooks are there. These might not be catchy pop sing-a-longs, but they are pervasive little earworms. I found myself playing phrases and choruses in my head all week while we were moving offices. Rabbit Hearted even joined my commute playlist! 66 And the cover art by Sha’an d’Anthes is wonderful as well!

And you know what really sells these songs? Her voice. Watching the covers on YouTube, Moriondo’s voice is tough to pin down: she’s singing live (-ish, there is a fair bit of polishing being done in post, but I don’t think she’s sweetening her basic vocal track at all), she’s adapting to other singers’ styles67 When I first heard her cover Billie Eilish I thought she was having trouble singing until I actually HEARD Eilish herself and realized that Moriondo was just mimicking her very breathy delivery. , and it’s hard to divorce watching her perform with just hearing her voice, isolated. Listening to the album, however, is a whole other experience. While Moriondo’s voice can sound more girly or more mature from song to song, her voice is always very natural and has such a dreamy character to it, for lack of a better word. In three or four years this might translate more to a sultry quality, but for now, it’s such a unique quality where nothing feels forced or whispered, it’s simply clear and smooth and…dreamy. Not to throw shade on Lana Del Rey, but I listen to her, and I always feel that she’s trying to force a specific sultry “noir” sound to her voice that just sounds unnatural. Chloe is the opposite of that. I’ll state again that I don’t listen to contemporary artists (maybe they all sound like this), but to me, her vocal quality is much more akin to singers from the 1940s than her peers. I think this is why her rendition of “La Vie En Rose” has resonated with so many people (it’s her most popular video with 3.5 million views) and her second highest viewed cover is P!ATD’s homage to Sinatra.68Out of all the covers, and I enjoyed being introduced to many new artists, this one was my favorite. Oh, I just checked and Creep by Radiohead was the second most views, because of course it was. I stand by P!ATD. I also think she would be well-suited to covering songs in that same vein occasionally, and there are lots to choose from (even ones that carry a dream motif!) I made a playlist with some apt selections, but I’d really love to hear her own arrangement of a song like “Stay Awake”, from the great Disney concept album of the same name. I think she’d kill it.

As an aside: there is a rich tradition of young singers like Paul Anka or Hanson hitting it big through contacts in the recording industry or by dropping out of school at an early age and street performing, etc. With an act that is signed and pushed by a Studio, it feels natural to listen to their music or see them on a Late Night show plugging their latest record (after all, we watched Taylor Swift at 14 doing this exact same thing.) Now, however, YouTube levels the field in such an incredible way, opening up an audience directly with the performer. Labels and Management have always needed talent more than talent has needed them, but now Talent has the means to do it all themselves and cut out middlemen entirely. (Probably not wise to cut out a good financial manager, though!) I’m sure it’s different for the generation that grew up with social media, but I struggle a bit with the sense of intrusion watching performers in their homes (even if they are explicitly inviting us in). Moriondo seems to understand this, too, with her standout “Little Moth” reading as both a comfort to her fans and a tacit caution to not try to intrude into her life too far.69Or is she the Moth in the song and needs protecting? Metaphors are fun! And I can’t imagine what it’s like to have to go through high school today dealing with mental problems in addition to social media, even though Moriondo seems pretty smart and self-aware, definitely more than I was at her age. Props to her parents for a strong support system. 70I mean, I’m making an assumption here, but all in all, she seems like a great kid and kids don’t raise themselves. AmIrite??

But back to me: hearing this album really knocked me for a loop. After doing the ‘same old’, ‘same old’ for so long you forget what it’s like to accidentally discover something new and wonderful. And it really made me depressed! I couldn’t believe that someone so young had made such an accomplished work, while I had barely made anything for ten years or more. I went to sleep that night pretty bummed. And woke up at 3 am with my first migraine in 4 years (and the first one EVER that I could recall happening while I was asleep.) I’m not going to assume the events were related (the germ thing was pretty stressful) but when I finally woke up the next day I felt like I had had a real moment of clarity: I remembered back to when I was 15 and was painting canvases nearly every single day. When I was compelled to CREATE, all the time. Making movies, writing stories, drawing, drawing, drawing. 71 I had started writing a long “in my day” passage here about how I had to use a silent Super 8 camera and edit with a razor blade for 3 minutes of grainy footage while kids today have iPhones and Final Cut to make pro-level videos when I realized that being an early adopter of Photoshop let me jump over the old guys using markers to color Xerox copies who probably thought the very same thing about me. The circle of life, it moves us all. And I wasn’t depressed anymore. Heck, I was almost euphoric. Sure, I could wish I was 15 again 72Lord, do I wish I were 15 again! But it’s not my age that has changed me from that naive, idealistic, driven young man. It was very, very clear to me that the only thing holding me back was me. It’s a decade of conformity, of choosing security now over potential rewards later after 20 years of chasing dreams. I can’t stress enough how much it felt like I was awakening from a fog that I didn’t know I was in for the first time in a long while. I want to create FOR ME again for the first time in a long, long while.

And THAT’S why I’m writing this review. Is this album meant for me? Probably not. But as a wise person once said, “Like what you like, don’t what you don’t,” and I LIKE this album. I don’t expect many people to see this; I’m writing it to write something. To get moving, to be productive. I’m writing it for me (like everything else on this site). And I’m writing it to show the impact that even a small artist can have on someone they never met. In retrospect, ANY chain of events leading to a singular moment looks like fate in reverse; I don’t know why I saw that video when I did, right before she dropped an album that I would never have heard in a million years. But it happened. And now we’ll see if any real change will take hold. (And at least I did the illustration at the top of this article! That’s something, right?)

As for Chloe Moriondo, I see big things ahead for her. It’s no accident she’s blowing up right now or that she has a bigger subscriber base than some of the very artists she’s covering. And I don’t know if it’s by design or instinct, but her online persona is a marketer’s dream (and I say that as a marketing exec!73Although I market Twizzler and Takis, not musicians. Alas. ) The glasses, the ease of conversing with her audience, the yellow room, the building of a brand with her use of repeated gestures and great custom thumbnails…it’s the same reason why Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift are where they are. Good music will get you noticed but being unique will make you a star. Just…stay a kid as long as you can. Surround yourself with good friends and steadfast protectors. Aggressively have fun. Go to college; the world will wait. (And just to throw it out there, Chloe Moriondo was made for Austin, Tx. Or New York. But Los Angeles grinds down talented people.74My Angelino buddies might disagree, but I saw it all too much in the seven years I lived there.)

So Rabbit Hearted is very good and if I’m grading on a curve made up of albums from teenagers it’s a 5 out of 5. (But I’m not going to give grades to someone still in school!) I can’t stop listening to it right now. And I’m really excited to see what she does next, and in 3 years, in 5 years and so on. But I think at that point the world will be watching along with me. And dreaming.

One last note: if you like a YouTube artist, watch the ads before their videos all the way through. They don’t get much for them in the first place and they get nothing if you hit skip. Just FYI.75That said, I refuse to not skip the ads on half the poorly made shit on YouTube. That’s why I like stuff like Patreon, so I can actually pay the artist for each video and only steal from corporations.

Update – 7/06/2015

So in the nine years since the first installment of this post, the vintage comic strips reprints has absolutely exploded. I would never have imagined in 2006 that what I was calling “The Golden Age of Comic Strip” would REALLY be a gold age. Seriously, I don’t know how this will ever be surpassed, except that someday everything will be available digitally. But for the quality of the reprints that are being made now and the sheer quantity of titles, I don’t see how it could get better. Pretty much all of my personal grails have been addressed, and a lot of secondary ones are on the way. I mean, we’re on volume 25 of Peanuts! Volume 19 of Dick Tracy! Volume 14 of Mary Perkins, which wraps up over 20 years of continuity, just as that strip’s creator, the very talented Leonard Starr, died last week. It’s good that he was able to see such love for his work at that stage of his life. I’m happy I got to meet him briefly during a San Diego Comic Con a few years ago (as he was chatting with Ray Bradbury!) It would be even better if someone would reprint his run that revived Annie in the wake of the hit stage show. In any case, it’s not unusual now for comic strips to be back in the headlines. There is a Peanuts movie hitting the theaters soon (the first since Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown in 1980), the New Yorker is running articles about Gasoline Alley, you can go on a cruise with the top cartoonists of today, and there is a recent documentary that has hit Netflix and VOD about the gradual fall of the comic strip and newspapers in general, and what that means for the future of the medium.

Having begun as a successful Kickstarter campaign, this documentary, Stripped, is pretty good and for those who haven’t been following the industry very informative. Director Dave Kellett interviews over 70 people connected to the comic strip biz including most of the stars from the past 30 years. But there’s one “get” that is truly astounding, seeing as this person doesn’t general give interviews, talk to the public, or have his picture taken: Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t think anyone who was alive during 1985-1995 needs to be told the hold that Calvin and Hobbes has on that generation. Or that Bill Watterson is considered a genius for the way he translated universal feelings about growing up into the adventures of a boy and his (stuffed?) tiger. But since his voluntary retirement in 1995, Watterson has been as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger, not making any appearances, not giving any interviews, just generally staying away from any kind of limelight. He preferred to let his work speak for him, which it did indeed, being continually in print throughout the years. And a massive hardcover box set reprinting every single strip was produced in 2005 with a paperback version following in 2012. And that was it. For nearly 20 years only the strip remained to remind us of his genius.

Until now. Now, suddenly, Bill Watterson seems to be (relatively) everywhere. He is interviewed in that Stripped documentary, albeit in voice only. In fact, he apparently liked the documentary so much he drew the poster, his first published cartoon work in 19 years! He also drew the poster for the 2015 Angoulême International Comics Festival, although he wouldn’t be attending, even though it’s tradition having won the Grand Prix the previous year. And even stranger, but more exciting, he once again graced the newspaper comic pages! In an unannounced guest spot on Stephen Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine strip, Watterson drew the meat of a narrative sequence that lasted for a week last Summer. All of this activity is wildly out of the ordinary for the seldom seen artist but his most important recent appearance is that of a very long, very detailed interview with Jenny Robb of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum that has been published as a catalogue accompanying an exhibit of his work: Exploring Calvin And Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue. If you are a fan of Calvin and Hobbes at all, I highly recommend chasing down all of those links and especially the interview book itself.

My homemade Calvin and Hobbes

Even if Mr. Watterson keeps up this welcome recent visibility, one thing you probably will still never see is any merchandise surrounding Calvin and Hobbes. Now, being that this site is mainly about the love of licensed merchandise, you might think that I would be disappointed by this, and possibly pursue that very American pastime of wanting more: more interviews, more cartoons, more Bill Watterson. But surprisingly, I don’t. That hasn’t always been the case. In fact, in the late 1980s I even tried sculpting Calvin and Hobbes myself, for my sister (who still owns these). I wanted merchandise, I wanted plush, I wanted t-shirts, I wanted toys. But Bill Watterson didn’t. Boy, he really didn’t. I’m going to digress here for a moment to reflect on Charles Schulz, a man who did not mind merchandise, or movies, or toys whatsoever. One big reason why he didn’t mind was that he trusted the company who was responsible for the majority of Peanuts products for over 40 years, a company called Determined Productions. While they are sadly no longer around, while Schulz was alive the took extremely good care of his creations. If you bought any Snoopy or Charlie Brown merchandise from the 1960s to the 1990s, odds are it was stamped Determined Prod. somewhere on it. They made books, they made plush, they made the Russell Stover figurines, for cryin’ out loud! And Charles Schulz trusted them quite a bit. I know this because it just so happens I worked for Determined for number of years, mainly designing toys for Wendy’s, but seeing a lot of the overall relationship with the Peanuts brand.

I bring this up because of a story that was told to me not long after I started working there. I was very curious about the history of the company and all the licenses they had worked with, and at one point Calvin and Hobbes came up. Now, this story may be apocryphal but this is how it was told to me, and knowing what we know about Bill Watterson I have no reason to doubt it. Supposedly when Calvin and Hobbes hit big in the late 1980s, Determined wanted to see if there was possibility of manufacturing some items based on the strip (at the time they were making merchandise from a lot of the popular characters of the day such as Felix the cat, Garfield, and Where the Wild Things Are). But they had no way of contacting Watterson directly, as he wasn’t returning correspondence sent to his syndicate. So they asked Charles Schulz to give an introduction, which he did, writing a letter extolling the care and craftsmanship that Determined gave to all of his characters. They created detailed prototypes of Calvin, Hobbes as a tiger, Hobbes as a stuffed toy, and Spaceman Spiff (which I was told were magnificent) and sent them off with Schulz recommendation. And then they heard nothing. Nothing at all for weeks. Until one day they received a package…that contained no correspondence of any kind, just the cut up remains of the plush prototypes. Thus ended their pursuit of that license.

I’ve thought about this story off and on over the years. The severe reaction to Determined’s overture intrigues me, and the older I get the more I realize that very few things in the world reman untainted or uncompromised. But this beloved comic strip has. And when you read the few times that Watterson has explained himself you see that it wasn’t an easy fight, that he had to battle over and over until he won the full rights to his creation that he was able to protect it fully. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy he’s peeked out for a bit and I’d welcome the occasional artwork, but I think now after 20 years since the end of Calvin and Hobbes I’ve come around to agreeing with his viewpoint. Calvin and Hobbes is a perfect creation; to try and extend it or make anything that takes it out of the realm of comic strip would change it. And not, I think, for the better. So let’s just leave it alone. No more websites about Calvin and Hobbes, no more “peeing bumper stickers”, no more documentaries about what the strip means to everyone. Let Peanuts have the big movies. I’ll be content occasionally taking one of those books off the shelf and letting my imagination take me to places that no movie ever could. Just like Bill Watterson wants it.

Update – 7/27/2010

Here’s the thing: San Diego Comic Con is no longer about comics. Yes, I know this is not news. Many, many, many people have pointed out what a shame it is that movie, tv, and toys have taken over the con in the past decade. I am not necessarily one of those people: I enjoy the con more for the broader scope and the inclusion of hollywood. I especially like that SDCC has replaced Toy Fair as the place to celebrate collectors and unveil new toys for the year (although I really wish companies could figure out how to keep a lid on news better so there were more genuine surprises).

Fantagraphics has spent over two years negotiating with Disney over these reprints. And while Carl Barks’ and his Ducks comics are well-known and revered, a much smaller group of people is aware of the seminal work done by Gottfredson on Mickey Mouse. These strips are pretty much the last of the “greats” to be reprinted, in what is now the Golden Age for classic comic strip reprints. What is big about this news is that these strips have NEVER been reprinted uncut before, and many of them not at all. Think about that: for 70 years, Disney has let some of the best work featuring their flagship character go unseen. Can you imagine if Marvel had never reprinted the Ditko Spider-Man issues, except in compilations? Sure, many individual stories have been chopped up into comics over the years, but these stories were heavily edited, rewritten, and relettered.

While it remains to be seen if Disney can bring themselves to go through with a hands-off policy, Fantagraphics has the best shot ever to not only show these strips as they were originally seen (and from all accounts, Disney keeps excellent copies of everything in their morgue, so they’ll look better than anyone has seen them) but do so in a great presentation, judging by their treatment of Peanuts and Popeye among others. I’m just hoping that Disney sees that these are of historical value and let’s Fantagraphics reprint EVERYTHING, warts and all.

Now where are those Gottfredson Mouse & Friends toys?!?

Original Post – 12/30/2006

If there is one thing I enjoy collecting more than toys, it has to be books. I like books in all shapes and sizes, but mostly concentrate on biographies, books on history, art, and films. But one genre is the most near and dear to my heart: compilations of classic comic strips.

But the one strip that really grabbed me (outside of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey and Carl Bark’s Duck stories) was the absurdist fantasy world of E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, aka Popeye (At one point, I thought I would even make the ‘definitive’ Popeye website!). Now, growing up with classic cartoons on tv every afternoon in the 70s had given me an already healthy appreciation of the spinach-eating sailor. But that Popeye was nowhere near as rich a character as the one to be found in the original run of comic strips. Sadly, what passed for Popeye in the comic pages of the day was a pale imitation of ‘gag-a-day’ strips done by Segar’s old assistant, Bud Sagendorf. And Popeye was by no means alone in this regard: Mickey, Moon Mullins, Barney Google (now Snuffy Smith) and others had all been reduced to simple comedy, eschewing more complicated continuities and abdication almost all storytelling to comic books and TV. Even those strips like Dick Tracy and Mary Worth that still continued to run longer storylines couldn’t hold a candle to their glory days. And don’t even get me started on the newspaper version of Spider-Man, where sometimes it took weeks for Peter Parker to walk out of his apartment door!

But it turned out that I was in luck! I was growing up at just the right time, as numerous publishers had seen fit to reprint selected titles from the Golden age of newspaper strips, most likely in response to Bill Blackbeard’s Smithsonian volume. Shel Dorf was reprinting numerous title with his Blackthorne label, Bill Blackbeard was covering Wash Tubbs & Easy (and an ill-fated attempt at reprinting the Gottfredson’s Mickeys), Another Rainbow was publishing a massive B&W Carl Bark’s Library, and Kitchen Sink was undertaking the first comprehensive reprinting of Li’l Abner, from 1934 to 1977! Even better, Fantagraphics begin publishing a magazine devoted to comics strips, Nemo, a selection of Little Orphan Annie books, and the jewel in the crown: The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye.I gobbled up all of these books and devoured them time and again. The intricacy of the art and the cinematic nature of the storytelling all left me lamenting the state of the modern comics page. But at least I had the reprints…for a time. By the early 90s a shift had taken place. Video games and “grim ‘n gritty’ comics were crowding out simpler fare, and by the middle of the decade even the last of the reprints had died out. Collections of classic strips would be all but forgotten. But there were a few signs of life: DC Comics had been publishing archives of Will Eisner’s Spirit since the late 90s, and in recent years both Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side debuted single volume collections that contained EVERY strips from each’s respective runs. But classic strips still had not gotten their due. Until 2004, that is. That’s when our old friends at Fantagraphics were able to fulfill a lifelong dream of theirs: comprehensively reprinting Charles Shultz’s Peanuts in chronological order (which amazingly had never been done). The sales of these initial volumes far exceeded expectations, leading to a new boom in reprints- not only are the old strips being rediscovered, but this time around (unlike in the 80s) they are being given the upscale designer treatment with heavy stock, handsome covers, and in some cases full color Sundays at the original publication sizes.

In the past year we’ve seen new editions of Buz Sawyer, Peanuts, Gasoline Alley, Dennis the Menace, Dick Tracy, Mary Perkins, Li’l Abner, Steve Canyon, and yes, Popeye, finally printed in a huge edition complete with color Sunday pages. And even more are coming in the future? Who knows. Even though I really would like to see someone tackle Annie and Moon Mullins, my biggest wish would be for Disney to recognize the market out there for a quality B&W reprinting of the Mickey Mouse strips in chronological order. They’ve never been reprinting unedited since publication. But with sequences like this they probably will never have the guts to release it. Which is why I blew a few hundred bucks last year on decent quality xeroxes of the fabled Comic Buch Club Germany portfolio. Still, I’d much rather have a nice clean official version. If these compilations continue to do well in the marketplace, I may yet get my wish someday. And they we might even see toys based on the classic Gottfredson Mouse and Barks Ducks! Oh, and if you really want a good look at the sorry state of today’s comic strips, why not give The Comics Curmudgeon a read?

So I was browsing through Netflix the other night, looking at their range of mediocre to abysmal choices of things I haven’t seen when I stumbled across the newish documentary “The People vs George Lucas”. With no better choices at hand I proceeded to watch it as I wrapped up some late night editing for a project I’m behind on at my “real job”. Let me rephrase that: I tried to watch it. I got about halfway through it before I had to turn it off and put on a Beatles album (FYI: A Hard Day’s Night) to wash away the taste it left in my brain. At its most basic, this was nothing more than what any Star Wars fan has seen thousands of times in every nerd/geek/fanboy forum online since the special editions were released in 1997 up through Revenge of the Sith in 2005. And honestly, I’m kind of tired of going over the same ground over and over and over (Han shot first, Jar Jar sucks, George doesn’t care about us, fans have equal ownership, ad infinitum).

To make it perfectly clear, I didn’t really care for the film. Decently made, but I didn’t see the point to it (even if you tell me at the end they defend George’s right to do whatever he wants with his films…who cares? That point was debated a decade ago). But it did really open my eyes to something I’ve never really thought about before: George absolutely did the right thing when he made the prequels. What did he do right, you ask? Well, going all the way back to Star Wars in 1977, George has continually said that these are kid’s movies. Made for kids. Now, most fans see that as a cop-out. An excuse, a shoddy justification for everything they don’t like about the prequels. And I’m not the first person to point out that he is right, these are kid’s movies. We fell in love with them as children. If you really go back and look at Star Wars today with a clear, cynical grown-up’s eye, you can see how juvenile the first movie was. How black and white. How simplistic.Â And there is nothing wrong with that.

Somewhere down the line, “kid’s movie” became synonymous with “dumbed down crap”, but it wasn’t always that way. E.T. is a “kid’s movie”. Every Disney classic is a “kid’s movie”. You can say that The Wizard of Oz is a kid’s movie. But what we’re really saying is that these are family films- enjoyable for all ages. Now, the prequels are regrettably lacking in finesse. They definitely could have used a rewrite or two and a little better character motivations. But look around: kid’s today still love these movies. They like Jar Jar. They think the Battle Droids are funny. Go read Drew McWeeny’s great series on introducing his sons to the Saga: http://in-my-head.org/2011/11/07/recommended-reading-drew-mcweenys-film-nerd-2-0-star-wars-edition/

George made the right call here. He kept aiming that target in the same place he aimed it in 1977 and 1980 and 1983. And the kids that are enjoying the prequels today (and the Clone Wars, and the video games, and the toys) are going to grow up thinking just as fondly about all of this as we did 20-30 years ago.

I know what you’re thinking. I know, I know. You wanted to see something else. You want Jar Jar gone. You didn’t want silly Battle Droids and endless Jedi fighting. Or C-3PO’s antics. I get it, I really do. But let me point you in the direction of a comparable genre that didn’t take the path that Lucas did. No, this property at some point decided that instead of staying aimed at kids, it would grow up with them. It would evolve and start experimenting with just how far it could push the characters and the existing boundaries. It would get dark, it would get edgy. You know where I’m going with this: it’s comics.

At the same moment that Star Wars was capturing a generation of kids, comics was telling those kids that it was OK to never grown up and leave them behind like the previous generations did. No, once the 1980s hit continuity became king. If you weren’t on board from the beginning it became harder and harder to get on the ride. And every year less and less kids were reading comics. And comics responded by catering to that 80s generation’s every whim in a self-destructing feedback loop. So here we are. Comics exist almost solely as fodder for merchandise and movies and once the 40 and 50 year olds stop buying them the industry is pretty much going to die off (How’s that New 52 treating ya, fans?). Or move onto the web. And collectors alone can’t sustain all the toys or even movies when they are anything but a crowd pleasing, family friendly hit (looking at you, Green Lantern!) But Star Wars? Well, kids will be watching that just like they do the Disney films. Every seven years a new generation will pick it up, and the juggernaut starts up all over again.

As the years have gone by and I’ve gotten older (and wiser?) I’ve come to notice that every time one of our “distinguished men of AFi” have posted pictures of their past childhood holiday toy pictures that something has been missing from my life: namely, any similar pictures of MY childhood Christmases filled with toys. For that matter, I really never had any pictures of much of my childhood, period, outside of the typical family portraits. Or so I thought. Last year while home for the holidays I made an off-hand remark to that effect to my mother, who then asked why didn’t I look in all the boxes of slides we had stored upstairs. Turns out that my parents DID take a tremendous amount of pictures, only they were almost all slide film and then put away once we stopped gathering around the ol’ Kodak Carousel. Since I was curious as to what slides we had, I took it upon myself to scan them all and convert them into nice digital files.

Well, over 6000 slides, 12 months, and many hundreds of hours later, I now know what is on all of those slides (and might I add they date back into the 1950s, well before I was around). And I still have around 2000 more slides to scan…unless they find even more boxes, which is a very distinct possibility. But within all of those pictures, I did find a number of great shots of what I received for Christmases past. I haven’t gotten into the 1980s yet, and if you had asked me before I scanned them what toys I received, I would have told you that I mainly got cars & planes, model trains, and a toy drum set until 1978. At that point my life was overtaken by Star Wars, (I even made my own xmas stocking shaped like Boba Fett’s leg, seen at right!) and I can’t really remember owning any other toys until I started collecting in earnest in college (well after throwing away everything I had in childhood).

What I wouldn’t have said I owed was any GI Joe toys. I do remember having the awesome Sea Wolf sub, and maybe a Joe with Kung-Fu grip, but I would have stopped there and said I didn’t play with the Joes. I would have been a damn liar. Turns out there is photographic proof that I indeed played with Joes. In fact, I owned a number of Adventure Team Joes, playsets and vehicles. And now that I’ve seen all these sets in their awesome packaging, I really, really wish I still owned them! Ah well. Take a look at the coolness below, along with some other early 1970s toys I wish I still owned, and a few other shots for a geeky childhood. I do still own that great Mickey Mouse head bank, along now with the other 3 characters they made. And as much as I claim to not like the Muppets, I apparently liked them enough back then to have a big-ass poster of Kermit and Fozzie on my wall. Anyway, enjoy the nostalgia!

The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, March 1979

Or, what the Space Shuttle means to me.

On Thursday, July 21, 2011, US Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time, returning from the last mission that the shuttle program will fly for the United States. The program and the shuttles themselves have been retired, cast aside due to a national lack of enthusiasm and a casualty of the ludicrous economic battles that pass for governance these days. But none of that matters to me when I think of the Space Shuttle.

First and foremost, to me, it remains the last exciting moment of the US Space program that really touched people when I was growing up. Sure, the Mars rover and the various interstellar missions of the past 20 years have been interesting, but the Space Shuttle program was a continuance of that bright, shining age when it really looked as if the science fiction was becoming the science reality. It was totally conceivable that by the year 2000 we might have (small) colonies on the moon, or a floating city in space to replace Skylab.

In 1979 my dad was in the Air Force, working at Kelly AFB in San Antonio when it was announced that the newly christened Shuttle Columbia, the first shuttle to go into space, would be stopping at Kelly overnight to refuel on it’s way to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I was already excited about the shuttle, having seen the promos for the new James Bond movie, Moonraker, that was coming out that summer, so when dad woke me at 6 am so we could drive across town to Kelly Field and watch it take off the news morning (on the back of a 747) I was beyond excited. I, of course, loved Star Wars and Buck Rogers, but this was REAL. I remember there were a lot of people who showed up to watch what was basically a big plane sit on a runaway, it an event that was closed to the public.

Afterward, we went to a hobby shop (Hobbies Unlimited, in Universal City, Tx) where he bought me a small toy Space Shuttle. I remember keeping it sitting on my desk for quite some time, enamored by its unique shape and markings. Unlike the previous spacecraft, the shuttle was a sleek, cool looking vehicle. I think it’s no coincidence that so many movies worked in the actual shuttle design instead of aping Star Wars when dealing with “non-fighter” craft. Unfortunately, we know how the rest of the story goes: I saw the Challenger disaster happen live on tv in my 11th-grade art class. I remember how horrified and distraught my teachers were that one of their own was on that ship. And the Columbia herself came to rest back in Texas in 2003 in another horrific accident, although I was in California by then.

But with all that, when I think of the Space Shuttle my mind always goes back to that little toy one my dad bought for me, and the long gone hobby shop where it was purchased. You can still find hobby shops, where you can buy model planes and trains, but they are becoming few and far between. Like Borders bookstores that are closing for good this month, and Circuit City, And Linen’s & Things, and all the mom & pop bookstores and variety stores before them, we are left with just one or two big box stores for each category now. The era of stores that catered to specialty items exist online, but it’s not the same. There is something to be said for riding your bike to the hobby shop for a model, then to the variety store (Winn’s? TG&Y?) for some action figures, then on to the drugstore for trading cards and a soda, ending up at the neighborhood used bookstore where the owner has a little side room filled with old comics and pulp paperbacks to leaf through. But those days are gone, and they’re not coming back. And now I fear the days of excitement over space exploration are joining them on the shelf marked “nostalgia”.

I mean, I’m OK as far as it goes. I can get the job done or at least figure out what needs to be done. But when it comes to guys like Matt Cauley or Kerry Gammill or Dave Hudnut (all guys I know and worked with) there’s just no comparison. And I’m cool with that. To be honest I never wanted to be an artist; I’m self-taught in the sense that I doodled in the margins of my school papers, and taught myself how to paint just for fun in high school, but I was never one of those guys that just HAD to draw. The ones that spent hours practicing, or laboring over tiny details, or studying the great artists to figure out the secrets

Nope. I just did it until I got bored and then I’d rush through the rest to finish it. I didn’t want to grow up to be an artist, it was just a hobby. It relaxed me, and I wanted to keep it that way. Sadly, life decided that I would end up having no marketable skills and I somehow backed into a career as a designer, first of toys and now of promotions.

The good news is that I’m quite good at computer programs like photoshop and illustrator. With those, I don’t need to be a good artist, I can fake it. But it is somewhat of a regret that I never really learned how to draw well. Now that I’m in my late 30s new skills don’t come quite so easily anymore, and I sometimes really struggle to get something looking how I want it to. It was much harder when I was a toy designer, as my puny skills meant that while I designed a lot of stuff, someone else would do the final artwork. Oh, I was able to design some nice display pieces, but they were almost always not my style or done by committee (which is kind of the default in any graphic business these days). Still, I was able to put my stamp on things by slipping in the random otter or hyrax onto the item.

Once I moved to doing promotions for big companies I got a lot more freedom to design display pieces, but it was still directed by multiple people within the agency and the client. It was my art, but not necessarily what I would have done given free reign (but then, given free reign I wouldn’t be making ads, either!) But most of what I do serves the client, and not me, which is how it should be.

So what’s the point of this post, you ask? Well, I was in Wal-Mart the other day and for the first time I saw some of my own artwork, in my own style, there on some product! It turns out that a while back I was doing some design options for a pool chemical company. They wanted some pieces that would evoke “summer fun” and I presented the usual stuff- photo montages of kids playing in the water. But literally at the last minute, I decided to slip in an extra option that no one had asked for: just some very retro style kids on a stark graphic background. At that point, I was moved to a new account and handed that one over to another very capable designer and didn’t think much about it. Well, it turns out they liked my concept and ran with it!

Which leads me to the bittersweet part. I mentioned before how I wasn’t a great artist. But I can fake my way through an awful lot. I did those designs in about 25 minutes, with the thought that if they didn’t like them it was no sweat and I didn’t waste a lot of time but if they got chosen then I would redraw everything to be really nice and very tight. But everyone really liked the art as it was! So the only modification that got made was adding goggles to the dog. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not ashamed of these or anything. But here is my own artwork untouched by anyone else, finally on store shelves (more or less) and it’s the equivalent of a rough sketch! Ah well…

BTW, you can find these on the neck of some bottles of pool chemicals in Wal-Mart, just over from the toy section. It’s a fold-out brochure on how to treat your pool. Whee!

Ten years to be exact. That’s when I left the oil fields (where I was shooting industrial video) and entered the world of product design. I got really lucky, having made some contacts through Raving Toy Maniac when I was running it with Eric G. Myers, to somehow stumble into a new career despite having zero experience and minimal skills at the time. What I did have was a crazy passion for the toy industry. And I think my boss saw that, and took a chance on me.Â We were a small start-up agency at first, and chased every opportunity we could come across. Of course, I was happy to be designing crap for A Bug’s Life and Dairy Queen’s Arctic Extreme toys but if you had asked me what I really would like to be working on, super heroes or action figures would have topped my list.

Well, except for Star Wars, that is. In 1998 I was just about the biggest Star Wars nerd around. Not only was I writing about the toys for RTM and hitting Toy Fair and SDCC, but my new co-worker, Steve Ross, was just as big of a nerd as me. Every day at lunch we’d hit Target or TRU trying to find the latest and greatest that Kenner and Galoob had to offer. Our offices were decorated solid with Star Wars. It was always at the forefront of our minds. And then one day our CEO told us that Pepsi wanted us to pitch some ideas of what promotional merchandise they could do for Episode One.

To say we were excited is an understatement. However, there were a few problems. One, since we were not yet an approved vendor to Lucasfilm, we had to use the Original Trilogy to concept with as we couldn’t be shown anything from Episode One. Lucasfilm would review our concepts and let us know if anything could apply to the new movie (this was a painful process that involved discarding far more ideas than the ones that were kept). Two, it was only a year away from the release of Episode One, and most manufacturing lead times were anywhere from 18-12 months to get the product made and to stores. But beggars can’t be choosers, and we hit the ground running. All told, we cranked out well over 100 concepts that were taken to final art, and easily 300 that didn’t make it that far. No part of Star Wars was too small to think about, no character too minor. I’ve never had a situation before or since where someone said to take your favorite subject and do whatever you want with it. Nothing was too crazy or expensive to try.

Me in my cubicle. Note the Yoda paint master on the desk in front of me.

We even tried to make a big Jabba the Hutt beanbag chair; one prototype was made and it sat in our conference room for many years. Now Gus Lopez owns it. Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun bouncing ideas back and forth where the conversations usually involved talking about how Darth Vader’s mouth had that cow-catcher looking mesh piece that really looked like it could be the door on a gumball machine. Or wondering it it was possible to build a real kid sized Land Speeder? Or thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to have a giant plush Wampa standing in your living room?

It was that last thought that led us to present a giant plush Wampa and a life-like shaggy Chewbacca to Lucasfilm in one batch of concepts. They weren’t so keen on Chewbacca, but they did have this new big sidekick named Jar Jar. And a cool new villain named Darth Maul. So, long story short, we ended up making four life size characters: Jar Jar, Maul, Yoda, and Watto. I got to go to Skywalker Ranch a few times, got to see The Phantom Menace early, and because we had to manufacture them all in half the time an action figure takes, I had to go live in China for a few months at the factory, teaching them how to paint Jar Jar’s ears just right. By the end of the thing, I was all Star Wars’d out!

So why is this post in the “Rejected!” category? Well, when I was unpacking some boxes after my recent move, I found a bunch of copies of our original concepts. Sadly, pretty much our entire creative team moved on not long after that but I think those guys were pound for pound pretty much the most talented folks I’ve ever worked with. So I want to give them their due by showing just a few of the nutty ideas that we pitched. I’ll probably have another round of these later, but these were really some of my favorites. And even ten years later, only a few of these ideas have shown up as products (You’d think someone else would have thought of them in all this time). We all touched every concept in some way, but the main guys who did these were Michael Hawkins, Steve Ross, me, and Kerry Gammill. And pretty much all of the really great ideas were by Steve Ross, who is probably the most creative person I’ll ever know. So without further ado…

UPDATE!:

Wow. I had no idea that this blog post of crazy Star Wars concepts would get picked up so fast and spread around the web. So welcome, new readers! Go check out the post on Mister Dog, you won’t regret it! And stick around next week for Toy Fair; we’ll have big pictures of lots of crap shown this year at the show in New York!

A few things I did want to clarify about the “Rejected” Star Wars concepts: “Rejected!” is the name of my ongoing series of unmade stuff. But not all of these were rejected by Lucasfilm. We don’t know how many of these were actually seen by Lucasfilm- they were presented to Pepsi first and then those concepts they liked were sent on to Lucas Licensing. So possibly a very small sample was shown to Lucasfilm. Also

That brings me to another point: most of what is shown are “Dealer Loaders”. Those items are offered to retailers (in this case to those stocking Pepsi) and function both as an incentive AND as a display. Once the display is no longer needed, the retailer can keep the item or raffle it off. So it wasn’t quite that we could make anything under the sun. It ideally should be a functional item that a non-Star Wars fan might want, but be cool enough to grab your attention in store. These would not be for sale at retail items. And keep in mind that these are all from 10 years ago when there wasn’t quite so much Star Wars stuff to be found.

Also, it seems the most frequent comment so far is that the Princess Leia headphones were taken from Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs”. Maybe they were, I didn’t come up with that idea. Personally, I’ve never seen “Spaceballs”, so I had no idea (it came out when I was in high school, and I didn’t think the trailer was that funny so i never went to see it). But really, that is one of the most no brainer ideas shown. Again, I’m amazed that ALL of these haven’t been made by now. We came up with hundreds of concepts and this is just a small amount. Heck, why weren’t more of these in Mel’s movie? Anyway, as far as I know we came up with the idea independently from the film, “from a certain point of view”.

Lastly, I saw a comment somewhere saying that one of the concepts looked like it was from MAD magazine. Ironically, Steve Ross wrote & drew for MAD before he came to work for us, so it makes sense that it looked like that. He also was an FBI sketch artist, did lasers for KISS, was a roadie for ZZ Top, did 3D animation, was a stand-up comedian, and can tell you every President, vice-President and their wives off the top of his head. Seriously, the guy is crazy talented.

Ok, so I’m in the grocery store the other day and while I was walking down the aisle between the fine products from Campbell’s Soup Company and the displays of healthy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups there was a sidecap rack with Little Golden Books on it. (Not to be confused with the German dog food brand, seen at right.)

Never one to pass by a literary opportunity, I glanced over at the rack and perused the title held within. What caught my eye was an intriguing tome labeled, “Mister Dog”. Even more intriguing was the fact that in 2008 there was a book marketed to children with a cover illustration of a dog smoking a pipe!

Now, I don’t know what was in Mister Dog’s pipe, but I do know what it felt like *I* had been smoking after reading this book. I’m not sure I can do the crazy, mixed-up world of Mister Dog justice, but suffice it to say that I bought that book then and there! The story generally follows the adventures of a dog that belonged to himself, with the challenging name of Crispin’s Crispian. Who is Crispin? Is the dog Crispin and “Crispian” is a term of endearment? Is it one of those weird cultural oddities, like “Carl’s Jr.” or “Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse”?

Anyway, the dog screws around, then meets a boy who is apparently a runaway. They go buy some food and take it back to the two-story doghouse, where they eat and go to sleep. The boy helps him clean the house. The dog almost never stops smoking. And was he chewing on his own hat? I wouldn’t put it past him, he is a dog. Seriously, it’s just some crazy-ass stuff. But don’t take my word for it, why not read this fine review. I wish Michael Bay would concentrate on classics to adapt like Mister Dog, rather than that Transformers crap.

The sad dénouement of all this was finding out that this was the last story of the author, Margaret Wise Brown. Ms. Brown was more famous as the writer of the wistful tale of nighttime ritual, “Goodnight, Moon”. But while on a promotional tour of Europe she fell ill and was hospitalized. After recuperating somewhat she tried to demonstrate her renewed health to her nurse by performing a high-kick, which triggered a sudden embolism that killed her on the spot. Oh, and she also owned a dog named “Crispin’s Crispian”, so I guess that explains that.